State Champ, page 4
I have the water with me now but I feel pretty bad. My fault for trying to hop my way in a sleeping bag. But I was freezing. And when I got myself upright my own blood just didn’t participate. All the blood just dove for my feet and my head was a big bloodfree balloon. Like there was no difference between an actual skull skin blood organ situation that stood five foot five and the old poster on the wall behind me, a portrait of a bisected girl, pretty teensy curl of fallopian tube, featureless face, general white-person flesh look. We were the same, poster girl and I. Gone 2D. I clipped my arm hard on the counter as I went down. Hit the corner. Must have been trying to catch myself. I think my arm was tucked awkward inside the bag and so I flung it out while I pirouetted down, like a helicopter spinning down from a maple tree, but dumber. My arm is still kind of bleeding. The blood is weird. I can’t tell if it’s weird. There’s a dent, like the counter stuck a sharp tiny finger into the flesh and curled it up, like come here. Anyway that’s why there’s blood all over this.
Yesterday I dragged two exam tables together, it was not easy, and now exam room 1 has no table and there are two here in room 2, which I think was the wrong choice, something’s wrong with this room, but I’m not going to drag everything back. I laid some binders out to make a hard surface on the second table. Now I can prop myself up, lean over and write.
John, you owe me this. I’m like in your world now, I’m news. I’m obviously interesting.
For this to work I need to be news.
It’s not a hunger strike if no one knows about it. That’s just a diet.
Here I am in some shut-down office, dieting.
What did Janine say to me once?
“I used to be like you.”
Bullshit and she knew it. Janine was a Donna. Donnas know Donnas. They’d kick me out of that convention on sight. Honestly if I have an equivalent on the other side, it’s the old drunk guy who still turns up in the parking lot every few months, like he didn’t get the memo, no one told him his kind got reformed out, and he’s holding some wet Bible he keeps trying to stuff in his back pocket, where it doesn’t fit, but he keeps trying, like he’s still thinking, even though he owns probably just the one Bible and the one pair of pants, get in there … That’s me. Whenever he comes Janine smiles real tight, and I once saw her reach forward and—like he was one of her little sons—zip his jacket up over his dumbass shirt, which bore variously gendered stick figures angrily arranged around some math symbols, as if this was how a higher being would communicate their “law.” Janine’s smile is 100% unconvincing. I used to think this was a weakness. She’s obviously never smiling, it’s just something her face does to keep men calm. But recently—maybe just now—I realized that deep down guys know it’s not real and that’s what they like. She’s the girl next door, but she’s a killer. She’s a sleeper agent, she’s on their side.
When Janine fake-smiled at you, you thought, oh yeah, what if I barely pretended to live in the world. What if I kept my dead eyes on my own mission.
“I used to be like you.”
She said it twice. I didn’t respond the first time so she said it again. I was just then doing something a little obnoxious. I was handing out condoms to the protestors. Fruity condoms. Not handing out. Throwing at. We got samples from a manufacturer. They showed up in the mail and I’d take some of the fun ones home. John, jog your memory? But that day the protestors were too fucking much. They were staying on the island in the parking lot, sure, but goddamn. The whiny hoses of their throats were emptying onto every normal person walking up, someone just wanting a little basic help with the wildest part of being alive. How life makes more of itself, it just uses you, like you’re not part of it. It’s normal to have some questions about that, push back. But these whiners. And let’s not pretend women’s voices don’t suck. It was like a sorority had spent 20 years braiding each other’s hair too tight while driving up the costs of each other’s weddings. Personally I was done. I was hungover, I think, and they were slamming their rubber baby dolls into my sweet young brainstem till whisky oozed out. I got a big handful of grape- and strawberry-flavored condoms out of my bag and ran out there. “Contraceptives for the community!” I screamed. I aimed for Janine’s mouth. That’s when she said it.
“I used to be like you.”
I was staring. You could say I looked insane but I was the one getting paid for my time. Right then what I was thinking—she was wearing a yellow-checked Talbots-type sundress that was kind of like a summer turtleneck—was that Janine had a huge rack, and so we were nothing alike. You’re either a boob girl or you’re not. If you’re not, you’re probably a leg girl. I don’t mean people can’t make a change if they want, they should do what they feel. I mean people know, moment by moment, which they are. It’s a deep feeling. Janine’s boobs were her whole point of view. I was braless. Whenever I threw a fruity condom at her face my nipple skimmed the inside of my shirt like a mean giggle.
“Fuck you, Janine,” I said.
“I was standing right where you’re standing right now,” she said. “I worked for the other side. I helped kill so many babies. I feel your pain.”
I was getting the feeling this was a new speech even to her obedient compadres. Like, people stopped to listen. Was I real or were they?
“We don’t kill babies here,” I said. “So if you were killing babies somewhere, that seems like more of a personal problem.”
“I can hear your pain,” Janine said. “You’re feeling their pain, and your own pain as a woman, and it’s filling you with anger. That’s what you’ll understand when you join the side of life. You can love and serve God’s creation instead of destroying the most innocent among us. Trust me. I’m not angry anymore.”
She’d stepped forward and I could see blobs in her mascara. Don’t do the bottom lashes, Janine.
“Eight fucking feet,” I said.
“You’re not a patron,” she said. “That law is for patrons.”
“Angela”—Donna was saying, hot hand on my throwing arm—“we need you inside.”
Janine and I could have gone some more rounds but here was Rose, walking slowly from an old station wagon toward the clinic door, and the whole dance was starting, the pamphlets, shrieking, simpering little pleas.
Janine, own it, you’re the angriest bitch I know.
John, what I’m saying is, that’s why I DM’ed her.
Janine gets it, you don’t.
Day 9
I didn’t know my aunt would come too. She got out of her car. She walked right up to Janine to introduce herself. These are her instincts. I was standing in the doorway.
This was yesterday. It was a pretty full day so I didn’t get a chance to write.
The windows are still—if you’d come, I wouldn’t have to tell you—boarded up, sheets of plywood. (I think part-time Stevie, who also works for some private practice, and so maybe was calmer because she’d only lost half a job, got her boyfriend to do this. Donna was saying something about it on that last last day, yanking chairs back from the front windows with insane energy.) The plywood’s been tagged. On the right, it’s just neighborhood kids or whatever, nothing impressive, though I’m glad they’re like getting outside and not just online all day. On the left: MURDERERS. Was this Janine’s handwriting? Not neat enough. But she probably tags with her nondominant hand, she’s sly. Janine was standing in the street, not on the sidewalk, wearing a creepy peacoat. “You can come closer,” I said, “we’re closed.” Janine held up her phone, took a photo. I tried to look saintly. I had on a wrinkly white shift dress over a black long-sleeved shirt. I’d had to add the shirt unfortunately because my arm was so bruised and trickling. “Hello,” my aunt said to Janine—before she even said hi to me, like Janine was hosting this party—shaking hands, stating her full name and that she was on city council. If asked she’d have named some committees. “Are you a friend”—she asked Janine, eyeing me—“of Angela’s?”
“Yes,” Janine said.
“Welcome,” I said. I kept one hand hard on the doorframe to stay upright. God, food is important.
Smell of Jamaican takeout from the place across the parking lot, on the far side of the strip’s two vacant storefronts. I had to swallow a goblet of spit to say:
“Thank you both so much for coming.”
My aunt took a tiny step forward. Was she scared?
“Angela, you need to come home with me right now. I know you’re upset, you’re right to be upset, but this isn’t helping. I think we can all agree”—and she spread her hands wide, including Janine—“this isn’t an effective way to get your point across.”
Janine was noncommittal. She lifted a hand to her hair and I realized it was raining.
I didn’t invite them in.
“I’m not trespassing,” I said to my aunt. “I mean, it’s a gray area. Dr. M’s son or Donna would have to complain.”
Janine turned her phone horizontal to get the whole word: MURDERERS. Thank god I’d wiped off my red lipstick, which had looked too undead.
“Angela?” she said. (Did she not know my name? What did she call us, to herself?) “Your name is Angela?”
My aunt looked at her suspiciously. I think there were exactly eight feet between them, like Janine just went through life this way.
“Angela,” Janine said. “You led me to believe there was a protest underway to try to”—she looked around, pulsing bass from a passing car, the almost empty lot—“reopen the clinic and free the imprisoned abortionist. Is this what I’m looking at?”
(My aunt tried: “Angela, who—”)
“Yes,” I said. “I’m on a hunger strike. This is the eighth day of my hunger strike to protest the false imprisonment of Dr. M.”
“Well, it’s not false imprisonment,” my aunt said.
“Oh my god,” I said. “She was doing her fucking job.”
“Her job was murder,” Janine said, gesturing at the plywood like it was evidence.
“I am going to continue my hunger strike until she’s released,” I announced into the wet underwhelming air.
“Angela,” said my aunt.
Janine put her phone in her coat pocket, like she was leaving.
“Don’t you want to save a life?” I asked Janine, shimmying a little, like I meant me, ta-da.
I remember thinking: her face is like a Terminator’s. Like she’s made of that alien steel from the future, housing her preprogrammed soul. 100% relentless. But even then I thought, honestly, she’s more like Sarah Connor. She looks like she does pull-ups and lands zingers all day, prioritizes a very important baby boy. She looks like she’s looking right at an establishment she personally got boarded up and shut down, and she feels great.
“You belong to a culture of death,” Janine said. “All this”—she waved her hand, somehow also including the wig store, the sad chiropractor—“extends from a failure to value God’s gift of life.”
I guess the point of those movies is that Sarah Connor, mom of the future messiah, herself becomes a sort of Terminator. But still vulnerable, which makes her human and hot. She’s as relentless in her intent to protect her son and the future of humanity as the machines are when programmed to kill. To defeat machines as smart as people, people have to be as single-minded as machines. Or as mothers. Single-minded about freedom, ironic. No fate. What I’m saying is, I remembered Janine lacked the power of irony. She ran on loser fuel.
I sat down in the doorway. The result was not modest. There was a little blood smudge below my palm. My aunt took a baby step closer.
“Janine, what do you tell the kids?” I asked. “What do you tell the young girls who’ve been raped and impregnated by their dad or their uncle?”
“That they don’t have to suffer more harm. They don’t have to harm themselves and their child, their suffering is over now. God’s love will—”
“This is God’s love,” I shouted, waving my arms, it was awkward, I was seated, kind of balled up and flailing.
(“Angela—”)
Janine didn’t blink: “The doctor wasn’t convicted for helping victims of rape and incest. You know that. She broke the law. She violated the rules of her own profession.”
A raindrop hit the bone that bumps up from my right foot, the bone that always rubs in sneakers. I swear even that bone was sticking out more, like my feet were slimming down. Why was I wearing flip-flops? It’s October.
I think I said: “You don’t get to choose. You don’t get to say, oh, this kid was raped, this fetus has bad enough defects, we all agree, but this baby could live a little while, this woman, she could have left him before it happened, she could have moved back home instead of staying, or gotten to the pharmacy before work even if she got fired for being late, or she could have gotten out of the car and run home. She could have taken the pill every day at exactly 7 a.m. instead of hitting snooze. She could have stopped drinking even though she didn’t know yet. She could’ve never ever drunk. She could’ve not worried about her job and just gotten pregnant two years earlier when the odds were better. She could’ve double-checked to see if he was wearing a condom like he said, like she saw him put on. No. You don’t get to choose. Think about it. A priest doesn’t choose who shows up every Sunday. You don’t get to be like, oh, when I said sinners I meant the really good ones, like the ones who aren’t sinners.”
“Angela,” my aunt said, “there are more effective—”
“There were heartbeats,” Janine said. “She knew there were heartbeats.”
“They’re not heartbeats,” I said, “but yeah, she knew. She did exactly what the law said not to do, you got her on that.”
“I think we should have higher standards,” Janine said. “I think medicine shouldn’t hurt the most vulnerable among us. We can do better, for women and for all our children. I think it’s worth considering how your standards got so low.”
(My aunt’s face didn’t love that.)
“I think,” I said to Janine, “you should live in the real world where real people have to live. Not some made-up world where you pretend that everything that ever happens is because people didn’t follow your made-up rules.”
“And are you living in the real world,” Janine said—hands out of her pockets, cream-pink nails in the gray rain—“right now?”
Fuck.
“You said you’d help me,” I said to my aunt. I didn’t think before saying it. I guess that’s how talking usually goes for me. “You said you’d help me.”
She’d said that twice. Not recently. Once when my mom died. And once, way more reluctantly, when I was on probation, figuring shit out. Pretty sure I got this job because she put in a word with a friend of Donna’s, in a reality in which Donna has friends.
“I am helping,” my aunt said. “I’m trying to help. Please come with me, get in the car, Angela.”
“You’re the same,” I said. “You two have the exact same problem. You know, when people ask you for help, you’re supposed to give them the help they’re asking for. If you give them some other help you think is better for them, you’re an asshole.”
“She was good at her job,” I added. “Dr. M is good at her job.”
“It’s more than a job,” I said, but that still didn’t get at it.
Did Janine really say I’ll pray for you?
That’s what I remember. But I was tuckered out.
“You have to let a doctor come see you,” my aunt said. “Please.”
“Whatever,” I said. “This is literally a doctor’s office.”
* * *
In Janine’s photo I look like a very old child. Does she have some filter designed for her enemies? Wondering if I didn’t look my best before I started the starvation thing. But the point is, late afternoon yesterday she posted it on her social media. Saying there’s no tactic we won’t use, etc., etc., etc., further proof … And I do look pretty psychotic. Well I bet Jesus looked like shit on the cross. John, why am I even bothering, because two reporters who weren’t you just came by. They, like, knocked. One of them looked like a really smart 16-year-old (she works for the alt-weekly, she says, though I don’t get the impression this is a paying position) and the other one said she was an old classmate of my aunt’s. She did not say friend. “This is the ninth day of my hunger strike,” I said. “I want them to release Dr. M. She can’t hunger strike because of her diabetes.”
* * *
And then, just like an hour ago, the phone rang. It was 8 p.m., maybe. I answered like always, “Patients First Health Clinic, this is Angela,” then added, “we’re technically closed.”
“Angela?”
“Yes?” I said.
“It’s Donna. You’re really there?”
“Yes,” I said. “Hi, Donna.”
Donna had seen Janine’s post. She asked a lot of questions.
“Angela,” Donna said, “you’re crazy. OK. I’m going to make sure it’s known that you’re allowed to be there. Do you need anything?”
“Not really,” I said. “I’m low-maintenance.”
She hmm’ed for a minute. She said: “We need more press.” Then she said: “Your aunt called me, you know.”
“OK,” I said.
“She’s worried,” Donna said. “Family always worries.”
“You’re not worried?”
She took a beat. Donna’s always on top of everything but she never rushes. How does that work?
“Worried isn’t the word for it,” she said. “I didn’t think things would go the way they went. I thought I would be ready, but I wasn’t ready. I’d say, Angela, that I had a dark night of the soul. But you were ready, weren’t you. You’re a girl who’s prepared for bad news.”
“I guess so.”
“I appreciate that,” she said. “I’m going to call you tomorrow. We’re going to send some people around to help out.”
She didn’t say who we or they were. Guess I’ll see. I picture Donna with an old-school Rolodex in which everyone she’s ever met is sorted and cross-referenced by skill set. Knife fights. FileMaker Pro.
